Recently, a plurality of image forming apparatuses may be shared by a plurality of client apparatuses through a network. In such case, each client apparatus needs to be provided with a printer driver specific to each one of the plurality of image forming apparatuses on the network. Without the printer driver being installed, the client apparatus is not capable of generating a printing job having a format specific to each image forming apparatus. For this reason, each client apparatus is usually provided with more than one printer driver. Further, the printer driver being installed on the client apparatus needs to be maintained to be the current version, for example, when the firmware of the image forming apparatus is updated due to the addition of a new image forming function.
Further, the printer driver, which is installed on the client apparatus, works on an operating system (OS) of the client apparatus such that the printer driver needs to be designed based on the OS. If the client apparatus is provided with more than one OS, or the OS with different versions, the client apparatus is required to install the printer driver specific to each type or version of the OS. Further, the printer driver being installed on the client apparatus needs to be maintained to be the current version, for example, when the version of the OS is updated.
As described above, management of one or more printer drivers in each client apparatus, which is usually operated by the human, has been cumbersome. In view of these limitations, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2004-7346 describes an image forming apparatus capable of providing a plurality of image forming functions, without requiring a computer terminal to install a plurality of drivers. However, the Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2004-7346 does not describe the case in which the user desires to perform various processing before or after image forming, which is not supported by the image forming apparatus.